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Dr. Brad Bushman, as we mentioned last week and like various faculty members in our college, is an advocate for making the effects of video games on children known so that they and their parents can make informed decisions. Realizing that some of his findings are unpopular with mainstream channels, Bushman challenges popular conceptions by taking painstaking efforts to design his studies in accordance with the scientific method. At a 2014 Hinckley presentation, he related how he did a study on aggression in which he assigned teenage boys to play either violent or nonviolent video games, and then see how they would react when competing against each other.

A group of 14-year-old boys were randomly assigned to play a violent or non violent video game for twenty minutes. After their game-time, the boys rated how cool they thought the game character was, and how much they wanted to be like them. Then, the boys competed against each other to see who could push a button the fastest. The winners got to blast the losers with sound. The winners could chose the duration and level of sound. The winners were told that levels eight through ten could cause permanent hearing damage (though they actually would not.) Some of the winners did indeed choose to blast the losers with those levels of sound, making comments like: “I blasted him with level 10 noise because he deserved it. I know he can get hearing damage, but I don’t care.” The results of his study are reflected in 140 others.

Watch the full lecture here for more information.